


Hunting the Monster

by Rivine



Category: Original Work
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Femslash, Horror, Obsession, Space Stations, Tentacles, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 15:16:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19065235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rivine/pseuds/Rivine
Summary: Something is hunting the inhabitants of the spaces station. Emma is hunting her back.





	Hunting the Monster

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ArgylePirateWD](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArgylePirateWD/gifts).



There was a monster on the space station, and she was the hottest thing Emma had ever seen.

More properly, she was an alien, but even the other aliens reacted as if she were a monster, so Emma felt free to think of her as one. It sent a frisson of delight down her spine: _a monster, on the space station_. There were times when Emma loved—absolutely _loved_ —working Station Security.

The monster had arrived out of nowhere, a mysterious creature from the black depths of space come to haunt the little station perched at the edge of this system. At first she left no trace of herself, only the broad smears of blood—human and alien alike—that she left in her wake. She hunted in personal quarters, in public restrooms, in private business spaces. Anywhere Security cameras weren’t.

Security put up more cameras, covering as many miles of access corridors and tunnels as they could until supplies ran out. Private citizens set up what recording equipment they had and begged to have their rooms patched into the Security monitoring system. Ethics were shaky this far from the main hubs of the system, and the morals of Station Security personnel were often far from perfect, and soon the quarters of the richest of the station’s inhabitants were as well-monitored as the major public areas.

And still, the monster slipped through the edges, stalking the gaps where there wasn’t quite coverage between one camera and the next. She seemed to know where every dark space was, and could move from one to another like a ghost.

Terror gripped the space station. Emma could feel it all around, a crackling tension hanging over every interaction among the station’s populace. The less-trodden areas of the station became dead, with no one willing to venture into them, and the busy areas teemed with people seeking safety in numbers and the watchful eyes of the security cameras.

Emma had been in war zones before she switched to security jobs, and few had ever felt as charged with dread as this station. Killing was in the air, and it was sudden, silent, and invisible. Emma felt it sparking through her body like a current of electricity. They were being hunted, and she meant to hunt back.

As the days went by and the deaths racked up along with them, the station’s inhabitants huddled closer, holding tighter and tighter to the large public areas. The attacks followed with them. People went missing when they had been seen only moments before, around corners that revealed nothing but frightening stains and a sense of sudden emptiness.

Emma lurked at the periphery—not at the true edges of the crowds, and not alone when she went to and from her quarters in the Security barracks, but close. She traveled in the smaller groups, angled for shifts patrolling a level removed from the more-densely populated areas. Like everyone else who had one, she kept her pulse gun with her at all times, and a folding blade clipped to her belt and tucked into each boot. The weight of them sent a thrill of anticipation through her. _She was hunting a monster._

At last, Emma saw her. Despite all her efforts, it was through a camera feed, not in the flesh. It was late at night, and she was in her quarters flicking through dozens of station security feeds in a pattern that had long since devolved into random clicking. A hint of movement in an otherwise-still maintenance corridor caught her eye, and her heart nearly stopped in her chest. 

Without breathing, hardly daring to move her fingers enough to expand the image out of the tiled array of camera inputs, Emma studied the corridor. It was empty, nothing but blank walls and a plain, well-worn floor. But something had moved, down in the corner of the frame. She knew it had.

She skipped back 30 seconds in the recording. It was still, empty. The seconds ticked by, Emma’s chest almost unbearably tight. Something slid, just barely, into view before pulling back out of sight. It was fast, and small, and it was caught on one of the second-rate, grainy, gray-scale cameras that Security had hurriedly pulled out of storage, but it was there. The monster had slipped up, and Emma had spotted her. 

“Hello, gorgeous,” Emma said to the screen. 

She replayed the footage, slowed down to a tenth speed and enlarged. It was the tip of a tentacle, or possibly a pseudopod, and its color shifted strangely. In black and white it was impossible to tell, but Emma thought it might be a dark shade overlaid with some form of iridescence. 

She paused the recording and stared at it, frozen in the moment before the monster started to retreat out of the camera’s field of view. “There you are. But you’ll be gone before anyone can get there, won’t you?”

Emma restarted the recording, letting the monster slip away, before running it back to the beginning and flagging the moment she appeared. She sent it to the head of Station Security. It would only be minutes before every resource that could be drummed up was focused on analyzing the recording, and at some point someone would look at the metadata hard enough to see how long it took from when she first replayed it to when she sent the alert. It couldn’t be too long, or there would be questions. Emma had never particularly liked other people’s questions. 

Slowly, she played the recording again. 

 

***

 

It took a week before Emma managed to see the monster in person. She was running hard in the direction where a new victim must have only just been taken moments before, her pulse gun in one hand and her belt knife open in the other, and as she skidded around a corner she saw a flash of something dark disappear around the turn ahead. 

She was deep blue, or maybe green, and the highest of her tentacles trailed back from some unseen point taller than Emma’s head. She had a half dozen tentacles at least, and they trailed out behind her while she tore around the corner away from Emma and the other Security Officers behind her. Emma tried to muster up more speed, but she couldn’t force her legs to move any faster than they already were, and the monster was gone. 

They chased her for a while longer, but Emma knew they had lost her. Back in her quarters, after finishing her report on the incident, she thought about her. There had been a sheen, an oil-slick rainbow, rippling across the monster’s skin. Her tentacles had coiled and lashed at the air, clearly anchored at various points ranging from the ground all the way up. Although Emma hadn’t been able to see how she propelled herself, she had moved smoothly, fluidly, across the floor. She had done so with the weight of an adult Marselleesian—either carried or consumed—burdening her. 

She was the most stunning thing Emma had ever seen. 

Emma pulled up the station plans again. She drew a line from where the Marselleesian’s blood spatter had streaked the floor with orange, to where she had caught her glimpse of the monster. Dots speckled the plans, but this was the first line. The first confirmed route her monster had taken. 

 

***

 

Emma cashed in all her favors to get on the shifts she needed. There were times and locations that were starting to emerge, as there always would be when a non-random force generated enough data, and the monster’s kills were piling up as fast as ever. They were faint patterns, and it took the fastest computers on the station and expertise messaged in from the hubs to begin teasing them out. It was still far too early for anything solid, but Emma had gone in on a bribe with a handful of her coworkers, and they got the preliminary findings.

Her coworkers used it to find which patrols to avoid. Emma used it as a goal. 

She hunted the monster on a 16-hour cycle, mainly on the solar side of the station and on the upper decks. 

On the eleventh cycle, she found her. Her whole team—Emma and two other Security Officers—found her, but that wasn’t important to Emma. What was important was that when one of the others opened the hatch and the monster was surprised behind it, Emma was looking at her and she was looking at Emma. 

Emma already had her pulse gun drawn, as she did at every hatch they opened. She had a clear shot at the monster and was about to take it when the officer next to her shoved into her as he turned and fled. She scrambled to recover, but rose to see the monster recoiling, and the officer who had opened the hatch aiming her own weapon. 

She was going to shoot Emma’s monster. _Someone else was going to kill Emma’s monster._

“No!” she yelled without thinking, and lunged at her, pushing her arm away. The shot went wild, sailing harmlessly next to the monster instead of into her center of mass. 

The other officer shouted, confused and struggling to process this new source of danger. Emma kneed her in the stomach and wrenched the gun from her hands while she doubled over. 

In a flurry of bluish-green movement, a wave of tentacles snaked through the hatch and wrapped around the officer. They lifted her up and swept her through the doorway, and the monster vanished while Emma panted and stared after her. 

 

 

***

 

The monster found her after her next shift. Emma’s new teammates were nervous around her, not because they suspected she had turned on her former team member, but because with nothing better to turn to, superstition was running rampant. Emma had come close to the creature that stalked them all, and that made her unlucky. They treated her cautiously, and were quick to try to leave her presence when their patrol ended. This gave her ample opportunity to lag behind them on the way back to the barracks, and tempt the monster into showing herself.

The thought of another killing the monster—of someone else drawing a bead on that column of dark tentacles, of someone else staring into those lime-green eyes atop slender eyestalks and watching them grow dull and still—plagued Emma. She had struggled with it all night, and lost. She had resolved that she would kill the monster, or no one would. 

And so she walked slowly at the back of the group, weapons ready, straining to hear the slightest whisper of sound that might signal the monster accepting her bait. Every corner ratcheted the tension higher as her coworkers passed out of sight around it, leaving her briefly alone. They were almost at the barracks, and Emma was nearly quivering with stifled anticipation, when the monster came. 

She was silent. Emma had no warning, and no chance to raise either pulse gun or knife before she was enveloped in tentacles. They wrapped around her arms, her torso, and lifted her bodily off the ground. One clamped across her mouth, keeping her from yelling. 

Emma felt a flood of emotion course through her. Elation, that she had lured out her monster. Rage, that she was overwhelmed so instantaneously by her quarry. And entwined with both of them, a burning hot desire. 

The monster gripped Emma tighter in her tentacles, squeezing the breath from her lungs. Emma’s vision darkened, fuzzy gray creeping in from the edges. 

And then the monster let go. Emma fell to her knees, barely catching herself with her hands before collapsing completely. 

She twisted, half falling into sitting down as she looked up to where the monster should be looming over her. She was met with an empty corridor, and the feeling of movement that had just vanished out of sight. 

Emma dragged herself to her feet. Nearly dying always left her giddy, but this time the rush of euphoria mixed with disappointment was truly exhilarating. She started walking towards the barracks, feeling as if the gravity had gone wrong in some subtle but vital way. 

 

***

 

The next day she snuck away during her time off. It was difficult to find a time and place where she could do so unnoticed, since no one ever traveled alone anymore. But she found it, and did it, and set out towards the solar side of the station, and the upper decks. Emma found a black zone, where the cameras didn’t cover a whole swath of maintenance corridors, and stood with her back to the wall in the middle of a long straightaway. 

She waited for about two hours before the monster came. 

The monster slid slowly, soundlessly, gliding on roiling, curling tentacles around the corner. She shimmered with oily glints on her blue-green skin, her bright eyes flashes of stable color among the swirls of her iridescence. 

“I’ve got you,” Emma said softly. “I’ve _got_ you.” 

She watched the monster approached, her gun in one hand and a knife in the other. Both were raised, but she didn’t take the shot. Instead she stood quietly as the monster came toward her, and eventually, as slowly as the monster was moving, Emma lowered her weapons. 

The monster stopped when her tentacles were a few feet away from Emma. They stared at one another. This close, Emma could see that the eyes at the ends of the stocks scattered all among the tentacles had thin, inky black spirals in the bright, luminous green. Emma thought she could drown in those eyes. 

Her eyestalks began to bob and weave, in small motions at first, but gathering momentum as the tips of her tentacles started to shiver and flick. She quivered closer to Emma, until her tentacles almost touched her. 

The last of Emma’s self-restraint broke, and she reached out. She buried her hands in a sea of wiggling tentacles, cool skin sliding and twisting between her fingers and around her wrists and arms. 

The monster coiled and shivered harder, faster. A thicker tentacle, coming from somewhere deep inside the mass of writhing tentacles, emerged. Unlike the others, it was wet, slippery with a clear fluid that shone slickly on the edges of the bumps and shallow grooves running along its length. The monster began to slide it up and down one of Emma’s arms. 

Emma grabbed one of the monster’s other tentacles, pulling it closer to her. The monster allowed it, the muscles of her tentacle relaxing in Emma’s hand enough for her to draw it to her body, and then push it down between her legs. 

Emma ground on it desperately, as if she had been given one last chance to orgasm for the rest of her life. The tentacle was firm, and arched up against her when the monster appeared to understand what she was doing. The pressure and the texture of the fabric of her pants made Emma groan. She rubbed herself against it harder, roughly, gazing into the tangle of flailing tentacles and waving eyestalks. 

The thicker, grooved tentacle massaging Emma’s arm started to flatten, going from a round cross section to a wide oval, then thinned and broadened further as its edges curled around her arm. The monster wrapped it into a tube encasing her arm, and it began to squeeze and pull at her. It sucked on her arm in waves of wet, cool pressure. 

Emma let go of the tentacle she had slid between her legs. It obligingly stayed pressed up against her, slowly shifting and twisting, and Emma ran her hand along the tentacle curled around her arm. 

The monster’s eyes darkened in a wave across her body, then brightened again. Emma looked closer, struggling to focus through her desire, and realized that the thin black spirals in each eye were thickening, making her eyes almost black as they dilated and then shifting back to lime green when they contracted. 

Emma pressed harder on the tentacle, digging the palm of her hand in as she rubbed it. The monster’s eyes flashed faster, and her tentacles trembled at their tips. Emma rubbed faster, grinding in time with her hand. 

Emma laughed, dizzy and triumphant, as the monster’s pupils went wide and stayed that way, space-black dots in a shuddering jumble of tentacles. 

“You’re mine,” she gasped, as she rode the monster’s twitching tentacle harder. “You are amazing, and _you’re_ _mine_.”


End file.
